A book project on the rape of German women at the end of the Second World War and during the occupation has first to confront certain prejudices. It is as if a single frame in a film has been frozen in our collective memory. It shows a Russian with Asiatic features yelling ‘Urri, Urri’, but demanding not only the watch but also the woman. We have all seen it on television: blonde woman, played by Nina Hoss, amid the rubble, with a slavering Mongol waiting in the shadows. Is there still anything important to say on this subject? The war is long over, the victims are very old or dead, and later generations find the war stories from Hollywood or Babelsberg more exciting. And then rape – is that not a relic, an archaic crime that always proceeds along much the same lines whether in Germany then, or in Iraq, Syria or South Sudan today? At best the subject offers a cheap platform for the eternal moralists and nationalists with their clear ideas about good and evil. Then it was the Russians who were the wrongdoers; today it is others – in any event, evil men once again.

While working on this book, I frequently asked myself why the wartime rape of German women was still of interest to me today, more than seventy years later. The simple and half-true answer is that the lens through which we look at this time is in urgent need of cleaning.

We historians neatly talk of a ‘gap in research’ when we find very little reliable information about a topic. But the historians’ demand for full accountability is not a sufficient argument for me. There must be more important reasons for descending into such a dark valley.

One such reason could be the demand for fair treatment. The legitimacy of the recollection of the events that took place after the arrival of the Allies is still questioned. There are still voices that say that the investigation of the mass rape of German women is inevitably designed to make up for the crimes committed against victims of German aggression and hence to relativize the Holocaust.¹ Others contest the relevance of the subject itself, claiming that German society is just deluding itself into thinking that it has a blind spot in this regard. It is a pseudo-taboo, they say, that is repeatedly broken so that it can be erected again.² And there are those who doubt the credibility of the victims, as the recent discussion of the diary by ‘Anonymous’ entitled A Woman in Berlin has shown.³

But for me the main reason for addressing this fundamental mistrust is that a considerable number of those affected have never been recognized as victims. According to my calculations, at least 860,000 women (and a good number of men) were raped after the war. At least 190,000 of them, perhaps even more, were assaulted by US soldiers, others by British, Belgian or French. Nothing has ever been said about these victims. Just as the misdeeds of ‘big brother’ were swept under the carpet in East Germany, West German society also kept silent about the attacks by its democratic liberators. The women raped by Russian soldiers were at least afforded some recognition, even if it was manipulated for ideological ends, being used to point a finger in the East–West conflict. The women violated by GIs, British and French soldiers, by contrast, were, if anything, punished with contempt. Under the Sword of Damocles of the public condemnation of ‘fraternizing women’ – i.e. women who allegedly prostituted themselves to the ‘enemy’ and thus stabbed their own nation in the back – it was practically impossible for the victims of Western sexual aggression to have their stories told. The same applied to the women in the Soviet occupied zone and East Germany. In those cases, too, the experience of violence, if mentioned at all, was put down to their own character weakness.

There have been only two books to date that have reached a wider audience: the diary by ‘Anonymous’ mentioned earlier, which was made into a film in 2008, and the first study by the feminist and film-maker Helke Sander in 1992. Both projects had the same setting – Berlin – and the same perpetrators – members of the Red Army. However worthy these two studies were, they reinforced the belief of most Germans that the wartime sexual violence was a problem of the Soviet soldiers, whereas the other Allies had rather to be protected from lovelorn German women. Thus Sander and ‘Anonymous’, and also the journalist Erich Kuby with his series ‘The Russians in Berlin’, which appeared in the German news magazine Der Spiegel in the 1960s, helped confirm the stereotype. As a consequence, the way people recall the mass rape at the end of the Second World War has become a right–left question: on the one hand, the revisionists and right-wing functionaries representing the German refugees from Eastern Europe, for whom the suffering of women was part of the dream of a Greater Germany, and, on the other hand, the left-wingers, who wanted to defend the reputation of the Soviet ‘liberators’ by playing down the rape by the Soviet army. This remains the greatest prejudice in dealing with this subject today.

But ignoring the crimes does not make them go away. There are still women (and possibly men as well) living in old people’s and nursing homes who remain haunted by their painful memories. They only need to hear a word in English or to be washed roughly by their carers for the memory to return. For that reason, Martina Böhmer, a specialist in geriatric care and trauma therapist, has been touring Germany for years in an attempt to raise the awareness of the staff of those institutions that they might be dealing in their daily work with victims of traumatizing wartime sexual violence.⁴

Even if this problem will soon cease to exist because the last victims will have died, will it have been resolved? Psychologists have discovered that Germany’s history still has an impact, generations later. This is easy to understand in the case of women and men who as children were witnesses, or even the product, of the rape of their mothers. But it is also important for their children to be aware of what happened and of the fate of the victims, and to form an idea of the wounds that many of the supposedly sturdy and resolute ‘Trümmerfrauen’ (‘rubble women’), today’s grandmothers and great-grandmothers, carried with them from the war. It is also essential to look again at the moral and sexist prejudices that women were confronted with at the time. They were denied any recognition not only because what they had suffered was considered shameful, but also because female sexuality was basically viewed with suspicion. They are accused of somehow having asked for it.

In the beginning, they probably kept quiet because of numbness and shock, and the inability to put their experience into words. Then other things became more important – above all, the economic and social reconstruction of the country and the re-establishment of the conventional patriarchal family model. Then, their own painful experiences had to take second place to political considerations and to the desire to take advantage of the assistance offered by the Allies. There was also the justified priority of dealing with the crimes committed by the Germans. But at some point, the reasons for continuing to ignore the mass rape dry up.

Even today there is an impenetrable barrier of silence, the social opprobrium, moral condescension, political instrumentalization, official chicanery, patronizing compensation, feminist partiality and lack of recognition causing raped women (and men) to be repeatedly hurt, humiliated, ignored or preached to. Experts give the name ‘secondary victimization’ to this cruel experience on the part of the victims of violence, who then become victims of social exclusion.

One further aim of this book is to show the degree to which raped women after 1945 were made into victims again by doctors who arbitrarily approved or refused abortions, by social workers who declared pregnant women to be ‘wayward’ and put them in reformatories, by neighbours who self-righteously gossiped about the supposedly bad reputation of these women, and by unfeeling jurists who refused compensation because they didn’t believe the women’s statements.

Many detailed studies will still be required to make a complete reconstruction of the post-war rapes – in other words, to do justice to all of the circumstances inside and outside East and West Germany, to the legal and administrative consequences in all four occupied zones, and to communications between the Allied armed forces and the German authorities, and to follow up the traces of the fathers of the children of raped women throughout the world. For the British occupation zone in particular, I found only very few sources. Were the British soldiers the only ones to behave decently at the time? Many questions remain to be answered. Nevertheless, the sources I was able to study provided such concurring and convincing answers that some of the crassest misconceptions about wartime sexual violence against German women can be refuted:

• it was mostly Russians who attacked fleeing German women in particular, so as to take revenge for their own suffering;
• the Western Allied soldiers did not need to use force as they got everything they wanted for a Lucky Strike;
• the rape victims got over the experience ‘incredibly quickly’ because they formed part of a community in which everyone had suffered the same fate;
• when they returned from the war or imprisonment, the husbands of the raped women rejected their ‘dishonoured’ wives and children;
• the women raped by Russian or black soldiers aborted as quickly as possible for racist reasons;
• the rape problem was suppressed after 1949 on account of injured male vanity, and reinterpreted as a metaphor for the rape of the nation as a whole.

These are all misconceptions and generalizations that this book would like to dispel. My aim is to cast a new light on this difficult subject and to untangle the half-truths and traditional prejudices. Above all, I would like to correct the image of monstrous Asiatic Russian or Moroccan rapists as compared with white Western liberators, who, as has now become clear, followed precisely the same script of plunder and rape. Fantasy, prejudices and reality can be quickly separated if we reconstruct the events of the time from the victims’ perspective, rather than turning them into malleable material for the rewriting of history as both conservative and liberal representations have tended to do in the past. It is time for the victims themselves to speak and for them to be rehabilitated, without their being exonerated from the crimes committed by the Germans under the Nazi regime. It is important to recognize the ambiguity of the victim and perpetrator roles in order to provide relief to their children and grandchildren from the traumatic after-effects of what their mothers and grandmothers experienced seventy years ago. This can be done by continuing to heighten the awareness of our own history that has been gradually developing in Germany in the last few years.